“It was a shock,” Hodges told Goode. “No other crabs in the trap. It had to weigh eight pounds.”

Sportfishing boats from Bay Area harbors are now offering crab-combo trips where they set crab pots and also fish for rockfish on the same trip.

“I have seen lobster off the Cement Ship at Aptos,” said Giancarlo Thomae, a naturalist and marine biologist in Monterey Bay. “I think people buy them alive at a restaurant aquarium, feel sorry for them and let them go. My bet is somebody bought it at Chinese restaurant in San Francisco and then let it go and it made its way out to the Farallon Islands.

“There are so few of them that unless they are grouped in one place, they won’t be able to find each other to breed.”

In El Nino years, spiny lobsters from Southern California have occasionally been caught as far north as Santa Cruz.